Gladstone: A Biography by Roy Jenkins

countryside and the neighbours. A decade or so later, with
considerable improvements already effected, he was converted to the attractions of Haddo, began to retreat there as frequently as possible, and became a great Scotsman, much involved for instance
in the Scottish Church controversies leading to the schism of 1843, although showing a much cooler religious spirit than Gladstone would have done.
    His bereavements began with and were always dominated by the death of his first wife, the daughter of the then Marquess of Abercorn, when he was twenty-eight. He was exceptionally devoted and
continued to wear mourning for her throughout the remaining forty-nine years of his life. She left him with three daughters under five (the couple had also had a stillborn son), all of whom died
before they were twenty-one.In 1815 Aberdeen had made a second marriage to his first wife’s sister-in-law, the widow of Abercorn’s recently dead heir. She died in
1833, when Aberdeen was still under fifty. Their fifteen-year-old daughter followed the next year. Three sons, however, survived, one of whom (Arthur Gordon) makes several subsequent appearances in
Gladstone’s life and in this narrative.
    In view of all these tragedies Aberdeen’s reclusiveness was hardly surprising. A note of disinterested would-be withdrawal was one which he frequently and genuinely struck. ‘You look
for interest and amusement in the agitation of the world and the spectacle it affords; now I cannot express to you my distaste for everything of the kind. . . . I have had enough of the world . . .
and would willingly have as little to do with it as is decent.’ 2 So he wrote to the Princesse de Lieven in 1838. 5 And in 1845 he informed Sir Robert Peel, ‘I have no wish ever to enter the House of Lords again.’ 3
    Nonetheless he was always a sought-after figure and had in many ways a dazzling career, in both early and middle life. And although his premiership, like the end of Asquith’s, was vitiated
by his being a man made for the arts of peace caught up in the toils of war, he was venerated in old age, at least by those who knew him well, which category notably included Gladstone. Because of
his early succession, he was, together with Rosebery, the only Prime Minister since 1832 who never served in the House of Commons and one of only a few even before that date. His range of public
service over half a century was nonetheless wide. He was offered but refused the embassy to Sicily at the age of twenty-three. He was a Knight of the Thistle at twenty-four (and a Garter at
seventy-one, again with Rosebery one of the few men ever to hold the two orders). He accepted at the age of twenty-nine the embassy to Austria, which involved not the comforts of Vienna but a rough
mission to the field headquarters of the Emperor Franz II during the campaign which extruded Napoleon from the Germanic lands. The rigours of this involved bivouacking for a night in a Thuringian
hayloft with Chancellor Prince Metternich – himself then only thirty-nine. Fortified by theseexperiences Aberdeen became Foreign Secretary for the first of several tours
in 1828 at the age of forty-four.
    At the beginning of his association with Gladstone Aberdeen was thus already a great European figure, his fame temporarily equal to that of Palmerston, his repute higher. He was also later to be
described by Gladstone as ‘the man in public life of all others whom I have
loved
’. 4 And although Gladstone sometimes said almost
exactly the same about Sidney Herbert this rendered the high compliment neither insincere nor unduly diluted. Aberdeen was a mentor, Herbert a contemporary. Altogether it was a fine thing for
Gladstone to be his under-secretary at the age of twenty-five. The disadvantage was that it lasted for only three months, at the end of which came the collapse of the last attempt by a sovereign to
override the House of Commons in his choice of ministers.
    Gladstone then spent